Empowering high-performance automation for an increasingly connected world

Because of this modularity advantage, COM Express can substantially extend the useful life of key elements within critical infrastructures – a valuable benefit for industrial applications such as oil and gas, energy, and transportation. This is especially true when it comes to leveraging commercial technologies – often referred to as Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS).

In the past, vendors often used special niche and proprietary components on their products. However, for many of these component vendors, the long-term commitment to ensuring the continuing competitiveness of these products – with its requirement for extensive investment in R&D – meant that such components often had relatively short useful lifetimes, and didn’t benefit from the support of well-funded programs to minimize the impact of obsolescence.

refer to:http://industrial-embedded.com/articles/rugged-increasingly-connected-world/

Introduction to model-based

With model-based design, UAV engineers develop and simulate system models comprised of hardware and software using block diagrams and state charts, as shown in Figures 1 and 2. They then automatically generate, deploy, and verify code on their embedded systems. With textual computation languages and block diagram model tools, one can generate code in C, C++, Verilog, and VHDL languages, enabling implementation on MCU, DSP[], FPGA[], and ASIC hardware. This lets system, software, and hardware engineers collaborate using the same tools and environment to develop, implement, and verify systems. Given their auto-nomous nature, UAV systems heavily employ closed-loop controls, making system modeling and closed-loop simulation, as shown in Figures 1 and 2, a natural fit.
Testing actual UAV systems via ground-controlled flight tests is expensive. A better way is to test early in the design process using desktop simulation and lab test benches. With model-based design, verification starts as soon as models are created and simulated for the first time. Tests cases based on high-level requirements formalize simulation testing. A common verification workflow is to reuse the simulation tests throughout model-based design as the model transitions from system model to software model to source code to executable object code using code generators and cross-compilers.

Used during system design
Reused as an entry point for software design
Elaborated on during detailed software design (for example, by discretizing continuous time blocks and changing double-precision data to single-precision or fixed-point)
Used as input for embedded code generation
The test cases for system requirement validation likewise are reused on the model, source code, and executable object code to perform functional testing and collect coverage metrics.

refer to:
http://mil-embedded.com/articles/transitioning-do-178c-arp4754a-uav-using-model-based-design/

Almost half of automation sales in Asia

In order to help businesses better understand how to take advantage of the current climate and increase their industrial automation sales in Asia, particularly China, the CC-Link Partner Association (CLPA) is hosting a seminar entitled ‘Gateway to China’. The event will take place on 24th September at the Mitsubishi Electric Europe Tokyo Conference Suite in Hatfield.
In light of the sensitive current economic climate, many Asian companies are taking a more careful approach to investment – they are becoming more demanding towards their suppliers and making more enquiries before purchasing. Furthermore, according to IHS’ research, several Chinese manufacturers are currently developing products which are in direct competition with the ones provided by Western suppliers of industrial automation. These are only a few of the obstacles facing European vendors who want to penetrate the Asian market to change the way they do business.

Flexibility and the ability to respond to very specific demands are becoming essential factors when dealing with the Asian market. Being able to offer technologies and solutions which are compatible with the needs of Asian clients is no longer an option, it’s a must.

refer to:http://www.connectingindustry.com/automation/asia-claims-almost-half-of-automation-sales.aspx

Job title battle within technical company

There is a message here for employers. If you are paying less than the industry average, you could very likely lose your engineers. Based on data from industrial auto machines, a recruiting and contract staffing company based in Minnesota, there is a high demand for automation professionals, and high-quality candidates are hard to find. When companies do find good candidates, the candidates typically have multiple offers on the table. If your company employs high-quality professionals, pay them well, or you may lose them.

Does company size matter?Are you thinking of becoming an independent contractor? Our survey indicates that contractors make about $10,000 more per year than a direct employee. The average salary of a contractor (5.3% of respondents) is $116,636. That $10K may not be enough to cover the cost of insurance and other benefits available to direct employees, however.

If you look around your office or attend any embedded computer events, you will notice the sheer lack of females in the automation profession. This year the percentage of female respondents crept up slightly from 5.1% last year to 6.3%. Along with that gender gap comes a salary gap of about $11,283. The average salary for a male is $107,487, while the average salary for a female is $96,204.

refer to: http://www.automation.com/factors-that-affect-your-salary-what-you-need-to-know

Safety for increasing on-chip module

Glitch Filters
Spurious events at input pins can cause functional failures to a chip. Critical pins like reset and interrupt can have glitch filters to stop noise and transient spikes from getting in.

Redundant critical on-chip modules like processor, ISO, DMA controller, internal clock generator, and communications peripherals can improve reliability should a primary hardware module become non-functional while the vehicle is running. Such a system can have in-built error detection mechanisms and on-the-fly switching to redundant hardware to mitigate threats to passenger safety.
But this kind of redundant hardware architecture comes with the penalty of increased area and higher power management in silicon. Area penalties can be minimized by intelligent selection of which functions need to be duplicated in silicon. Power can be minimized by adopting power and clock gating in the redundant modules. Some  in-vehicle computers can be implemented in lock-step of each other, where primary and redundant modules process the same input. Mismatch in the output of the lock-step modules indicates a defect in either of the modules. The system can switch itself off or take appropriate safety measures to avoid any real-time failure. Redundant hardware should be placed quite far in silicon from the primary embedded systems to avoid tampering of both modules together.

refer to: http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4421704/Safety---security-architecture-for-automotive-ICs

Leveraging IT Technology for industrial controls applications

It is the author’s opinion that integration of the controls networking and the IT networking is inevitable. It became inevitable the moment the controls industry chose to use Ethernet as the medium with which to communicate data. The controls industry may choose to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern communications era, or it can gracefully embrace the change. Embracing means the controls industry would be able to leverage the myriad rich, existing technologies that have been proven foolproof in the IT world. To be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern communications era would do a terrible injustice to those who have worked diligently to bring it about. This could quite possibly add an entirely new facet to the fieldbus wars, which I hope have not been forgotten.

With that said, the controls world is going to be moving with an industry that has a definite consumer bias, with product development and release cycles of six months or less. In an industry where the average life expectancy of an automotive production line is eight years, it is impossible to expect the networks in an industrial setting to keep up with modern IT standards. Therefore, we turn our attention to the technologies that have existed the longest, with the most open standards and the very best support. These are the protocols we wish to use and keep, and this article highlights and explains some of these technologies.

This article does not focus on the technical automation of each piece of technology. Rather, it is assumed the reader will be using packaged solutions such as a function block for a PLC. These packages typically require only that the user specifies the relevant server to connect to, the data to be gathered and an activation bit. The particulars of each protocol and concept are, ideally, transparent to the user, and therefore it is not pressing that the user understands what is contained in each packet passed between the server and the client. As each protocol described in this article is openly documented and supported, a simple search on the Internet for the technical details will likely yield the relevant implementation details.

refer to:
http://www.automation.com/leveraging-it-technology-for-industrial-controls-applications

Improved performance for the Intel chipset

Performance is critical in solutions Things-enabled factories, as it enables greater analysis of product quality, equipment performance, and other factors. Overall performance is up 15 percent in the new processors, while signal and image processing get an additional 2x boost with Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX) 2.0. As shown in, Intel AVX 2.0 introduces a fully pipelined Fused Multiply Add (FMA3) that provides twice embedded systems performance of the previous generation for the multiply-add workloads common in image processing. Intel AVX 2.0 also extends integer vector processing from 128 bits to 256 bits, also doubling throughput for many fanless embedded systems workloads. Along the way we’ll present examples where members of the Intel Intelligent Systems Alliance are taking advantage of the new embedded systems.

refer to:

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/transform-factory-the-intel-core-processor/